Sunday, September 27, 2015

I have been busy and had a bout of illness, so I haven't updated my blog in a while. Mostly I've been researching new procedural content systems and re-reading SIGGRAPH papers while reworking my TDD. Been looking into merging GPU clipmaps with the old 100% procedural voxel terrain system to allow easier content creation. Also a lot of other stuff not worth showing even as a WIP like proc sun/sky. Right now I'm going to focus on sun only tests for physically based light until approx phyiscal units for color temperature, intensity, et al are choosen. Also various materials are being reworked to be more correct via tweaking until this is stood up for comparison with PBLs.

Right now my VR work on kagura is halted with the death of Linux SDKs for Occulus DK2. One of the reasons I'm starting this blog back up is I hope to get a Vive kit this year. In the meantime researching physically based lights and cameras along with other subsystems is a huge enough task. Physically based shading is great, but you end up hitting a brick wall without the other two -- I suggest reading SIGGRAPH 2015 The Order 1886 slidedecks, and "Moving Frostbite to PBS" is still one of the better introductions.

Playing around with various light models and LoD again in the old mesh terrain test scene aka breaking things that used to work. You might notice no IBL, no SSR, and no shadows in these; however they're not even the same BRDFs in the same materials in these shots either. Easier to me to lower amount of variables.